The Cathedral (Huysmans)/Chapter VIII
The somewhat dolefully calm frame of mind in which Durtal had been living since settling at Chartres came to a sudden end. One day ennui made him its prey, the black possession which would allow him neither to work, nor to read, nor to pray; so overwhelming that he knew not whither to turn nor what to do.
After spending dark and futile days in lounging round his library, taking down a volume and shutting it up again, opening another of which he failed to master a single page, he tried to escape from the weariness of the hours by taking walks, and he determined finally to study the town of Chartres.
He found a number of blind alleys and break-neck steeps, such as the road down the knoll of St. Nicolas, which tumbles from the top of the town to the bottom in a precipitous flight of steps; and then the Boulevard des Filles-Dieu, so lonely with its walks planted with trees, was worthy of his notice. Starting from the Place Drouaise, he came to a little bridge where the waters meet of the two branches of the Eure; to the right, above the eddying current and the buildings on the shore, he could see the pile of the old town shouldering up the cathedral; to the left, all along the quay, and looking out on the tall poplars that fanned the water-mills, were saw-mills and timber-yards, the washing places where laundresses knelt on straw in troughs, and the water foamed before them in widening inky circles splashed into white bubbles by the dip of a bird's wing.
This arm of the river diverted into the moat of the old ramparts, encircled Chartres, bordered on one side by the trees of the alleys, and on the other by cottages with terraced gardens down to the level of the stream, the two banks joined by foot-bridges of planks or cast iron arches.
Near where the Porte Guillaume uplifted its crenelated towers like raised pies, there were houses that looked as if they had been gutted, displaying, as in the vanished cagnards or vaults of the Hotel Dieu at Paris, cellars open on the level of the water, paved basements in whose depths of prison twilight stone steps could be seen; and on going out through the Porte Guillaume across a little humpbacked bridge, under the archway still showing the groove in which the portcullis had worked which was let down of yore to defend this side of the town, he came upon yet another arm of the river washing the feet of more houses, playing at hide and seek in the courts, musing between walls; and at once he was haunted by the recollection of another river just like this, with its decoction of walnut hulls frothed with bubbles; and to contribute to the suggestion, the more clearly to evoke a vision of the dismal Bièvre, the rank, acrid, pungent smell of tan, steeped, as it were, in vinegar, came up in fumes from this broth of medlar juice brought down by the Eure.
The Bièvre, a prisoner now in the sewers of Paris, seemed to have escaped from its dungeon and to have taken refuge at Chartres that it might live in the light of day; winding by the Rues de la Foulerie, de la Tannerie, du Massacre, the quarters invaded by the leather-dressers, the skinners and tan-peat makers.
But the Parisian environment, so pathetic in its aspect of silent suffering, was absent from this town; these streets suggested merely a declining hamlet, a poverty-stricken village. He felt something lacking in this second Bièvre, the fascination of exhaustion, the grace of the woman of Paris faded and smirched by misery; it lacked the charm compounded of pity and regret, of a fallen creature.
Such as they were, however, these streets, traced with a sort of descending twist round the hill on which the cathedral stood exalted, were the only curious by-ways of Chartres worth wandering through.
Here Durtal often succeeded in getting out of himself, in dreaming over the distressful weariness of these streams, and in ceasing to meditate on his own qualms, till he presently was tired of constant excursions in the same quarter of the town, and then he tramped through it in every direction, trying to find an interest in the sight of time-worn spots—the grace of Queen Berthe's tower, of Claude Huvé's house and other buildings that have survived the shock of ages; but the enthusiasm he threw into the study of these relics, spoilt by the foregone eulogiums of the guides, could not last, and he then fell back on the churches.
Although the cathedral crushed everything near it, Saint-Pierre, the ancient Abbey church of a Benedictine monastery, now used as barracks, deserved a lingering visit for the sake of its splendid windows, the dwelling-place of Abbots and Bishops who look down with stern eyes, holding up their croziers. And these windows, damaged by time, were very singular. Upright, in each lancet-shaped setting of white glass, rose a sword-blade bereft of its point; and in these square-tipped blades Saint Benedict and Saint Maur stood lost in thought, with Apostles and Popes, Prelates and Saints, standing out in robes of flame against the luminous whiteness of the borders.
Certainly Chartres could show the finest glass windows in the world; and each century had left its noblest stamp on its sanctuaries: the twelfth, thirteenth, and even the fifteenth, on the cathedral; the fourteenth on Saint Pierre; and a few examples—unfortunately broken up and used in a medley mosaic—of painted glass of the sixteenth century in Saint Aignan, another church where the vaulted roof had been washed of the colour of gingerbread speckled with anise-seed, by painters of our own day.
Durtal got through a few afternoons in these churches; then the charm of this prolonged study was at an end, and gloom took possession of him, even worse than before.
The Abbé Plomb, to divert his mind, took him for walks in the country, but La Beauce was so flat, so monotonous, that any variety of landscape was impossible to find. Then the Abbé took him through other parts of the town. Some of the buildings claimed their attention, as, for instance, the House of Detention, in the Rue-Sainte-Thérèse near the Palais de Justice. The edifices themselves were not, indeed, very impressive, but the history of their origin made them available as the fulcrum for old dreams. There was something in the prison walls, in their height and austerity, in their look of order and precision, which made the cloister wall of a Carmel look small. They had, in fact, of old, sheltered a Sisterhood of that Order, and a few steps further on, in a blind alley, was the entrance to the ancient convent of the Jacobins, the Mother-House of the great Sisterhood of Chartres: the Nursing Sisters of Saint Paul.
The Abbé Plomb took him to visit this house, and he retained a cheerful impression of the walk in the fresh air on the old ramparts. The Sisters had kept up the sentry's walk, which followed a long and narrow avenue with a statue of the Virgin at each end, one representing the Immaculate Conception, the other the Virgin Mother. And this walk, strewn with river-pebbles and edged with flowers, shut in on one side by the Abbey and the novices' schools, on the left overlooked a precipice down to the Butte des Charbonniers, and below that again, the Rue de la Couronne; while beyond lay the grass lawns of the Clos Saint Jean, the line of the railroad, labourers' hovels, and convent buildings.
"There you see," said the Abbé, "behind the embankment of the Western Railway stands the Convent of the Sisters of Our Lady and of the Carmelites; here, nearer to the town on this side of the line, are the Little Sisters of the Poor."
And indeed the place swarmed with convents: Sisters of the Visitation, Sisters of Providence, Sisters of Good Comfort, Ladies of the Sacred Heart, all lived in hives close round Chartres. Prayer hummed up on every side, rising as the fragrant breath of souls above a city where, by way of divine service, nothing was chanted but the price-current of grain and the higher and lower cost of horses in the fairs which, on certain days, brought all the copers of La Perche together in the cafés on the Place.
Besides this walk on the old ramparts, the Convent of the Sisters of Saint Paul was attractive by reason of its quiet and cleanliness. Down silent passages the backs of the good women might be seen crossed by the triangular fold of linen, and the click could be heard of their heavy black rosaries on links of copper, as they rattled on their skirts against the hanging bunch of keys. Their chapel was redolent of Louis XIV., at once childish and pompous, too much bedizened with gold, and the floor too shiny with wax; but there was an interesting detail: at the entrance large panes of glass had been substituted for the walls, so that in winter the sick, sitting in a warm room, could look through the glass partition and follow the services and hear the plain song of Solesmes which the Sisters had the good taste to use.
This visit revived Durtal's spirit; but he inevitably compared the peaceful hours told out in that retreat with others, and his disgust was increased for this town, and its inhabitants, and its avenues, and its boasted Place des Epars, aping a little Versailles, with its surrounding blatant mansions, and its ridiculous statue of Marceau in the middle.
And then the limpness of the place, hardly awake by sunrise and asleep again by dusk!
Once only did Durtal see it really awake, and that was on the day when Monseigneur Le Tilloy des Mofflaines was enthroned as Bishop.
Then suddenly the city was galvanized; projects were made, the various bodies corporate sat in committee, and men came forth who had lived within doors for years.
Scaffold poles were brought out from the masons' yards; blue and yellow flags were hoisted on them, and these masts were linked together by garlands of ivy-leaves sewn one over the other with white cotton.
Then Chartres was exhausted, and paused for breath.
Durtal, startled by these unexpected preparations and such an assumption of life, had gone out to meet the Bishop, as far as to the Rue Saint Michel. There, on the open square, a gymnastic apparatus had been erected, the swing bars and rings having been removed, and the poles garnished with pine branches and gilt paper rosettes, and surmounted by a trophy of tricolour flags arranged in a fan behind a painted cardboard shield. This was an arch of triumph, and under this the Brethren of the Christian Schools were to escort the canopy.
The procession, which had gone forth to fetch the Bishop from the Hospice of Saint Brice, where, in obedience to time-honoured custom, he had slept the night before entering his See, had made its way thither under a fine rain of chanted canticles, broken by heavier showers of brass sounding a pious flourish of trumpets. Slowly, with measured steps, the train wound along between two hedges of people crowded on the sidewalks, and all the way the windows, hung with drapery, displayed bunches of faces and leaning bodies, cut across the middle by the balcony bar.
At the head of the procession, behind the gaudy uniforms of the ponderous beadles, came the girls of the Congregational Schools, dressed in crude blue with white veils, in two ranks, filling up the roadway; then followed delegates of nuns from every Order that has a House in the diocese; Sisters of the Visitation from Dreux, Ladies of the Sacred Heart from Châteaudun, Sisters of the Immaculate Conception from Nogent le Rotrou, the uncloistered Sisters of the Cloistered Orders of Chartres, Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul and Poor Clares, whose dresses of blueish grey and peat-brown contrasted with the black robes of the others.
What was most odd was the various shapes of their coifs. Some had soft flapping blinkers, others wore them goffered and stiffened with starch; these hid their face at the bottom of a deep white tunnel; others, on the contrary, showed their countenance set in an oval frame of pleated cambric, prolonged behind into conical wings of starched linen lustrous from heavy irons. As he looked over this expanse of caps, Durtal was reminded of the Paris landscape of roofs, in shapes resembling the funnels worn by these nuns and the cocked hats of the beadles.
Then, behind these long files of sober-coloured garments, the scarlet vestments of the choirs came like the blare of trumpets. The little ones marched with downcast eyes, their arms crossed under their red capes edged with ermine, and behind them, a little in advance of the next group, walked two white cowls, that of a Brother of Picpus, and that of a Trappist who represented the Trappist Sisterhood of La Cour Peytral, to which he was chaplain.
Finally the Seminarists came on in a black crowd; those of the Great Seminary of Chartres and of the Little Seminary of Saint Chéron preceding the priests, and behind them, under a purple velvet canopy embroidered in gold with wheat ears and grapes, and decorated at each corner with bunches of snow-white feathers, with his mitre on his head and holding his crozier, came Monseigneur Le Tilloy des Mofflaines.
As he passed, in the act of blessing the street, many an unknown Lazarus rose up, the forgotten dead come back to life; His Reverence seemed to multiply the Miracles of the Lord. Effete old men, huddled in their chairs in the doorways or at the windows, revived for a second, and found strength enough to cross themselves. Persons who had been supposed dead for years managed almost to smile. The vacant eyes of old, old children gazed at the violet cross outlined in the air by the Prelate's gloved hand. Chartres, that city of the dead, had changed to a vast nursery; in the extravagance of its joy the town was in its second childhood.
But as soon as the Bishop was past the scene changed. Durtal was startled, and he tittered.
A whole "Court of Miracles" seemed to follow in the Prelate's train, strutting but tottering; a procession of old wrecks, dressed out in such garments as are sold from the dead-house, staggered along holding each other's arms, propped one against another. Every reach-me-down that had been hanging these twenty years flapped about their limbs, hindering their progress. Trousers with baggy ankles or with gaiter tops, balloon-shaped or close-fitting, made of loose-woven stuff or so shrunk that they would not meet the boot, displaying feet where the elastic sides wriggled like living vermin, and ankles covered with vermicelli dipped in ink; then the most impossibly threadbare and discoloured coats, made, as it seemed, of old billiard cloths, of tarpaulin worn to the canvas, of cast-off awnings; overcoats of cast iron, the surface worn off the back-seam and sleeves—glaucous waistcoats, sprigged with flowers and furnished with buttons of dry brawn-parings; and all this was as nothing; what was prodigious, beyond the bounds of belief, fabulous, positively insane, was the collection of hats that crowned these costumes.
The specimens of extinct headgear, lost in the night of ages, that were collected here! The veterans wore muff-boxes and gas-pipes; some had tall white hats, for all the world like toilet-pails turned upside down, or huge spigots with a hole for the head; others had donned felt hats like sponges, shaggy, long-haired Bolivars, melons on flat brims just like a tart on a dish; others, again, had crush-hats, which swayed and played the accordion on their own account, their ribs showing through the stuff.
The craziness of the gibus hats beats description. Some were very tall, the shaft crowned with a platform larger than the head, like the shako of an Imperial Lancer; others very low, ending in an inverted cone—the mouth of a blunderbuss or a Polish schapska.
And under this Sanhedrim of drunken hats were the mopping, wrinkled faces of very old men, with whiskers like white rabbits' paws, and bristles like tooth-brushes in their nostrils.
Durtal shook with inextinguishable laughter at this carnival of antiquities; but his mirth was soon over; he saw two Little Sisters of the Poor who were in charge of this school of fossils, and he understood. These poor creatures were dressed in clothes that had been begged, the rummage of wardrobes, for which the owners had no further use. Then the queerness of their outfit was pathetic; the Little Sisters must have been at infinite trouble to utilize these leavings of charity; and the old children, recking little of fashion, plumed themselves with pride at being so fine.
Durtal followed to the cathedral. When he reached the little square, the procession, caught by a gale of wind, was struggling and clinging to the banners, which bellied like the sails of a ship, carrying on the men who clutched the poles. At last, more or less easily, all the people were swallowed up in the basilica. The Te Deum was pouring out in a torrent from the organ. At this moment it really seemed as though, under the impulsion of this glorious hymn, the church, springing heavenward in a rapturous flight, were rising higher and higher; the echo resounded down the ages, repeating the hymn of triumph which had so often been sung under that roof; and for once the music was in harmony with the building, and spoke the language which the cathedral had learnt in its infancy.
Durtal was exultant. It seemed to him that Our Lady smiled down from those glowing windows, that She was touched by these accents, created by the saints she had loved, to embody for ever, in a definite melody, and in unique words, the scattered praise of the faithful, the unformulated rejoicing of the multitude.
Suddenly his exalted mood was sobered. The Te Deum was ended; a roll of drums and a clarion flourish rang out from the transept. And while the brass band of Chartres cannonaded the old walls with the balista of mere noise, he fled to breathe away from the crowd, which, however, did not nearly fill the church; and then, after the ceremony, he went to see the parade of representatives of the various institutions in the town, who came to pay their respects to the new Bishop in his palace.
There he could laugh and not be ashamed. The forecourt was packed full of priests. All the superiors of the different Archdeaconries—Chartres, Châteaudun, Nogent le Rotrou, and Dreux—had left there, within the great gate, their following of parish priests and curés, who were pacing round and round the green circus of a grass plot.
The big-wigs of the town, not at all less ridiculous than the pensioners of the Little Sisters of the Poor, crowded in, driving the ecclesiastics into the garden walks. Teratology seemed to have emptied out its specimen bottles; it was a seething swarm of human larvæ, of strange heads—bullet-shaped, egg-shaped, faces as seen through a bottle or in a distorting mirror, or escaped from one of Redon's grotesque albums; a perfect museum of monsters on the move. The stagnation of monotonous toil, handed down for generations from father to son in a city of the dead, was stamped on every face, and the Sunday-best festivity of the day added a touch of the absurd to hereditary ugliness.
Every black coat in Chartres had come out to take the air. Some dated from the days of the Directory, swallowed up the wearer's neck, climbed up high behind the nape, muffled the ears and padded the shoulders; others had shrunk by lying in the drawer, and their sleeves, much too short, cut the wearer round the armholes so that he dared not move.
A miasma of benzine and camphor exhaled from these groups. The clothes, only that morning taken out of pickle to be aired by the good wife, were pestilential. The stove-pipe hats were to match. Left to themselves on wardrobe shelves, they had surely grown taller; they towered immense, displaying on their mill-board column a thin covering of hairs.
This assembly of worthies admired and congratulated each other; clasped hands encased in white gloves—gloves scoured with paraffin, cleaned with indiarubber or breadcrumb. Presently a retiring wave cleared a space in the crowd of priests and laymen, who shrank back hat in hand to make way for an old hearse of a landau, drawn by a consumptive horse and driven by a sort of Moudjik, a coachman with a puffy face behind a thicket of hair sprouting on his cheeks and his mouth, in his ears and nose. This vehicle came to an anchor before the front steps, and out of it stepped a fat man, blown out like a bladder and buttoned up in an uniform with silver lace; after him came a thinner personage in a coat with facings of dark and light blue, and everybody bowed to the Préfet attended by one of his three Councillors.
They had lifted their plumed cocked hats, distributed a dole of hand-shaking, and vanished into the vestibule when the army made its appearance, represented by a Colonel of Cuirassiers, some officers of the Artillery and the Commissariat, a few subalterns of Infantry, and one gendarme.
This was all.
Within an hour of this reception the exhausted town was asleep again, not having energy enough even to remove the poles; Lazarus had gone back to his sepulchre, the resuscitated antiquities had relapsed into death; the streets were empty; reaction had ensued; Chartres would be exhausted for months by this outbreak.
"What a sty it is! What a hole!" cried Durtal to himself.
On certain days, tired of spending his afternoons shut up with his books or of attending service in the cathedral, hearing the canons languidly playing rackets from side to side of the choir with the Psalms, of which they tossed the verses to and fro in a mumbling tone, he would go down after dinner and smoke cigarettes in the little Place. At Chartres, eight o'clock in the evening was as three in the morning in any other town; every light was out, every house closed.
The priesthood, eager for bed, had shut up shop. No prayers to the Virgin, no Benediction, nothing in this cathedral! At such an hour, kneeling in the dark, you feel as if the Mother were more immediately present, nearer, more intimately your own; but these moments of confidence, when it is easier to tell Her all your trivial woes, were unknown at Notre Dame. No one was worn out by midnight prayer in that church!
But though he could not go in, Durtal could prowl round and about it. And then, scarcely seen by the light of the poverty-stricken lamps standing here and there on the square, the cathedral assumed strange aspects. The portals yawned as caverns full of blackness, and the outer shape of the body of the building, from the towers to the apse, with its abutments and buttresses merely guessed at in the dark, stood up like a cliff worn away by invisible waves. It might have been a mountain, its summit jagged by storms, eaten into deep caverns at the foot by a vanished ocean; and on going nearer he could in the gloom imagine ill-defined paths steeply running up the cliff, or winding on shelves at the edge of a rock; and, occasionally, midway on one of these dark paths, some white statue of a Bishop would start forth under a moonbeam, like a ghost haunting the ruins, and blessing all comers with uplifted fingers of stone.
These wanderings in the precincts of the cathedral, which by daylight was so light and slender, and in the dark seemed so ponderous and threatening, were ill-adapted to cure Durtal of his melancholy.
This illusion of rocks riven by the lightning, of caverns deserted by the waves, plunged him into fresh reveries, and at last threw him back on himself, ending, after many divagations of mind, in the contemplation of the ruin within him. Then once more he sounded his soul, and tried to reduce his thoughts to some sort of order.
"I am simply bored to death," said he to himself, "and why?" And by dint of analyzing his condition he came to this conclusion: "My state of boredom is not simple but two-fold; or, if it is indeed all of a piece, it may be divided into two very distinct phases: I am bored by myself, independently of place, of home, of books; and I am also bored by provincial life—the special form of boredom inherent in Chartres.
"Bored by myself—ah, yes, most heartily! How tired I am of watching myself, of trying to detect the secret of my disgust and contentiousness. When I contemplate my life I could sum it up thus: the past has been horrible; the present seems to me feeble and desolate; the future—is appalling."
He paused, and then went on,—
"During my first days here I was happy in the dream suggested by this cathedral. I believed it would re-act on my life, that it would people the solitude I felt within me, that it would, in a word, be a help to me in this provincial atmosphere. But I beguiled myself. In fact, it still weighs on me, it still holds me wrapped in the mild gloom of its crypt; but I can now reason about it, I can scrutinize its details, I try to talk to it of art, and in these inquiries I have lost the unreasoning sense of its environment, the silent fascination of the whole.
"I am less conscious now of its soul than of its body. I tried to study archæology, that contemptible anatomy of building, and I have fallen humanly in love with its beauty; the spiritual aspect has vanished, to leave nothing behind but the earthly part. Alas! I was determined to see, and I have wrecked trust; it is the eternal allegory of Psyche over again!
"And besides—besides—is not the weariness that is crushing me to some extent the fault of the Abbé Gévresin? By compelling me to much repetition he has exhausted in me the soothing and, at the same time, subversive virtue of the Sacrament; and the most evident result of this treatment is that my soul has collapsed and has no spirit to reinvigorate it.
"No, no," he went on presently. "Here I am working back on my perennial presumption, my incessant round of cares; and once more I am unjust to the Abbé. But it is certainly no fault of his if frequent Communion makes me cold. I look for sensations; but the very first thing should be to convince myself that such cravings are contemptible, and next, to understand clearly that it is precisely because Communion is so frigid that it is the more meritorious and virtuous, yes, that is very easy to say; but where is the Catholic who prefers such coldness to a glow? The saints may, no doubt; but even they suffer under it! It is so natural to entreat God for a little joy, to look forward to an Union consummated by a loving word, a sign—a mere nothing that may show that He is present.
"Say what they may, we cannot help being pained by a dead absorption of that living bread! And it is very hard to admit that Our Lord is wise when He keeps us in ignorance of the ills from which it preserves us and the progress it enables us to make, since, but for that, we might be defenceless against the attacks of self-conceit and the assaults of vanity—helpless against ourselves.
"In short, whatever the reason, I am no better off at Chartres than in Paris," was his conclusion. And when these reflections beset him, especially on Sundays, he regretted having accompanied the Abbé Gévresin into the country.
In Paris, in old days, he at any rate got through the hours at the services. He could attend Mass in the morning at the Benedictine chapel or at Saint Séverin, and go to Saint Sulpice for vespers or compline.
Here there was nothing; and yet where were there more promising conditions for the performance of Gregorian music than at Chartres?
Setting aside a few antiquated basses who could only bark, and whom it would be necessary to dismiss, there was a whole sheaf of rich young voices, a school of nearly a hundred boys who could have rolled out in clear, sweet tones the broad melodies of the old plain-song.
But in this ill-starred cathedral an inept precentor gave out, by way of liturgical canticles, a perfect menagerie of outlandish tunes, which, let loose on Sunday, seemed to scamper like marmosets up the pillars and under the roof. And the artless voices of the choir-boys were drilled to these musical monkey-tricks. At Chartres it was impossible to attend High Mass in the cathedral with any decent devotion.
The other services were not much better; indeed, Durtal was reduced to attending vespers at Notre Dame de la Brèche, in the lower town, a chapel where the priest, a friend of the Abbé Plomb, had introduced the use of Solesmes, and patiently trained a little choir composed of faithful working-men and pious boys.
The voices, especially the trebles, were not first-rate; but the priest, being a skilled musician, had contrived to train and soften them, and had, in fact, succeeded in getting the Benedictine art accepted in his church.
Unfortunately it was so ugly, so painfully adorned with images, that only by shutting his eyes could Durtal endure to remain in Notre Dame de la Brèche.
In the midst of this surge of reflections on his soul, on Paris, on the Eucharist, on music, on Chartres, Durtal was at last quite bewildered, not knowing where he was. Now and then, however, he recovered some tranquillity, and then he was astonished at himself, he could not understand himself.
"Why regret Paris—why, indeed?" he would ask himself. "Was the life I led there unlike that I lead here? Were not the churches there—Notre Dame de Paris, to name but one—just as much to be execrated for sacrilegious bravuras as Notre Dame de Chartres? On the other hand, I never went out there to lounge in the tiresome streets; I saw nobody but the Abbé Gévresin and Madame Bavoil, and I see them still, and oftener, in this town. I have even gained a friend by the move, a learned and agreeable companion, in the Abbé Plomb. So why?"
And then one morning, unexpectedly, every thing was plain to him. He saw quite clearly that he was on the wrong track, and without even seeking for it he found the right one.
To discover the unknown source of his flaccid longing for he knew not what, and his inexplicable dissatisfaction, he had only to look back a little way and pause at La Trappe. He saw now everything had begun there. Having reached that culminating point of his retrospect, he could, as it were, stand on a height and command a view of the declining years since he had left the monastery; and now, gazing at that descending panorama of his life, he discerned this:—
That from the time of his return to Paris a craving for the cloister had been incessantly permeating his being; he had unremittingly cherished the dream of retiring from the world, of living peacefully as a recluse near to God.
He had, to be sure, only thought of it definitely in the form of impossible longings and regrets, for he knew full well that neither was his body strong enough nor his soul staunch enough for him to bury himself as a Trappist. Still, once started from that spring-board, his imagination flew off at a tangent, overleaped every obstacle, floated in discursive reveries where he saw himself as a Friar in some easy-going convent under the rule of a merciful Order, devoted to liturgies and adoring art.
He could but shrug his shoulders, indeed, when he came back to himself, and smile at these dreams of the future which he indulged in hours of vacuous idleness; but this self-contempt of a man who catches himself in the very act of flagrant nonsense was nevertheless succeeded by the hope of not losing all the advantages of an honest delusion; and he could remount on a chimera which he thought less wild, as leading to a via media, a compromise, fancying that by moderating his ideal he should find it more attainable.
He assured himself that, in default of a really conventual life, he might perhaps achieve an illusory imitation of it by avoiding the turmoil of Paris and burying himself in a hole. And he now saw that he had completely cheated himself when, on discussing the question as to whether he should leave Paris and go to settle at Chartres, he had believed that he was yielding to the Abbé Gévresin's arguments and Madame Bavoil's urgency.
Certainly, without admitting it, without accounting for it, he had really acted on the prompting of this cherished dream. Would not Chartres be a sort of monastic haven, of open cloister, where he could enjoy his liberty and not have to give up his comforts? Would it not, at any rate, for lack of an unattainable hermitage, be a sop thrown to his desires; and supposing he could succeed in reducing his too exorbitant demands, give him the final repose and peace for which he had yearned ever since his return from La Trappe?
And nothing of all this had been realized. The unsettled feeling he had experienced in Paris had pursued him to Chartres. He was, as it were, on the march, or perched on a bough; he could not feel at home, but as a man lingering on in furnished rooms, whence he must presently depart.
In short, he had deluded himself when he had fancied that a man might make a cell of a solitary room in silent surroundings; the religious jog-trot in a provincial atmosphere had no resemblance to the life of a monastery. There was no illusion or suggestion of the convent.
This check, when he recognized it, added to the ardour or his regrets; and the distress which in Paris had lurked latent and ill-defined, developed at Chartres clear and unmistakable.
Then began an unremitting struggle with himself.
The Abbé Gévresin, whom he consulted, would only smile and treat him as in a novices' school or a seminary a youthful postulant is treated who confesses to deep melancholy and persistent weariness. His malady is not taken seriously; he is told that all his companions suffer the same temptations, the same qualms; he is sent away comforted, while his superiors seem to be laughing at him.
But at the end of a little time this method no longer succeeded. Then the Abbé was firm with Durtal, and one day, when his penitent was bemoaning himself, he replied,—
"It is an attack you must get over," and then he added lightly after a silence, "And it will not be the last or the worst."
At this Durtal turned restive; the Abbé, however, drove him to bay, wanting to make him confess how senseless his struggles were.
"The idea of the cloister haunts you," said he. "Well, then, what is there to hinder you? Why do you not retire to a Trappist convent?"
"You know very well that I am not strong enough to endure the rule."
"Then become an oblate; go to join Monsieur Bruno at Notre Dame de l'Atre."
"No, indeed, not that, at any rate. To be an oblate at La Trappe is the same thing as remaining at Chartres! It is a mere half-measure. Monsieur Bruno will always remain a boarder; he will never be a monk. He gets all the disadvantages of the cloister, and none of the benefits."
"But there are other monasteries besides those of La Trappe," replied the Abbé. "Be a Benedictine Father or oblate, a black Friar. Their rule seems to be mild; you will live in a world of learned men and writers; what more would you have?"
"I do not say—but—"
"But what?"
"I know nothing of them—"
"Nothing can be easier than to get to know them. The Abbé Plomb is a welcome friend at Solesmes. He can give all the introductions you can wish to that convent."
"Good; that is worth thinking about. I will consult the Abbé," said Durtal, rising to take leave of the old priest.
"The Black Dog is troubling you, our friend," observed Madame Bavoil, who had overheard the two men's conversation from the next room, the door between being open; and she came in, her breviary in her hand.
"Ah, ha!" she went on, looking at him over her spectacles, "do you suppose that by moving your soul from place to place you can change it? Your trouble is neither in the air nor outside you, but within you. On my word, to hear you talk, one might fancy that by travelling from one spot to another every discord could be avoided, that a man could escape from himself! Nothing can be more false. Ask the Father—"
And when Durtal, smiling awkwardly, was gone, Madame Bavoil questioned her master.
"What is really the matter with him?"
"He is being broken by the ordeal of dryness," replied the priest. "He is enduring a painful but not dangerous operation. So long as he preserves a love of prayer, and neglects none of his religious exercises, all will be well. That is the touchstone which enables us to discern whether such an attack is sent from Heaven."
"But, Father, he must at any rate be comforted."
"I can do nothing but pray for him."
"Another question: our friend is possessed by the notion of a monastic life; perhaps you ought to send him to a convent."
The Abbé gave an evasive shrug.
"Dryness of spirit and the dreams to which it gives rise are not the sign of a vocation," said he. "I might even say that they have a greater chance of thriving than of diminishing in the cloister. From that point of view conventual life might be bad for him. Still, that is not the only question to be considered—there is something else—and besides, who knows?" He was silent, and presently added: "Much may be possible. Give me my hat, Madame Bavoil. I will go and talk over Durtal with the Abbé Plomb."